Note: I refunded this game after ~2-3 hours of playing. Cris Tales is a pretty game. That is probably why you are here despite its high price tag - it looks great. With the exception of running around the world map and (some/all?) out of combat dungeon areas, the visuals are as good as the trailers. Unfortunately, its whole budget seems to have been spent on its looks. I'm not a veteran jrpg player, so I can't say too much about the combat/story but they both seem decent, if nothing special. The interaction of sending enemies to the future/past can feel gimmick-ey and what interacts with it and how has the potential be very unclear. (I don't know if it really is because I didn't get too far into the story) There are random battles and no health/mana regen outside of combat as far as I can tell. Its up to you if that bothers you or not. Battles have a real time element where you need to click at the right time to block an enemies attack or to get extra hits in. I didn't like this mechanic to begin with and I quickly became frustrated with the random hit times. Blocking is just guess and check for a bit until you get used to when a specific attack actually lands during the animation. Hitting a good block reduces most to all of the damage so I found myself cursing the unclear attack animations every time I got hit. The UI is entirely designed for controllers and it really, really shows. Navigation is a huge hassle on mouse and keyboard. To add insult to inconvenience, you can't rebind keys. That's right - for an indie game asking an ambitious $40 you can't even rebind keys off their weird default settings. Cris Tales has been out for many months now and the lack of keybinds is inexcusable. On their own, each of these complaints could be overlooked if the game was priced at $5-10. But for $40, your money is better spent elsewhere. If you are looking for a good jrpg, try Epic Battle Fantasy 4 and 5 - they were an absolute blast. (and way cheaper)
While the actual dungeon design is nothing special, there is a lot more to Noita meets the eye at first. Unlike a lot of other roguelikes putting in some thought to your builds can have a huge effect. Once you have a feel for the basics of the game, I would recommend looking up a wand building guide online and/or installing a wand testing mod to learn how to build wands. Practice building wands and you can build crazy world destroying wands from components you would have ignored before. There are also a crazy amount of secrets and the world is infinite as far as I can tell. With a good digging wand you can go through anything and you don't have to go down the cave at the start... Downsides: There is no progression and you will start every run pretty much the same. (Some spells don't show up in the loot pool until you find them in special ways/areas but that is pretty minor) Unless you go online, chances are you will miss out on whole side dungeons. The map is gargantuan compared with the areas you go through for the standard runs. You pretty much need to google wand building to really understand how to make good wands beyond the basic "this spell has good damage, I'll shove it in my wand"
